Google Photos

If your daily digital life relies on Google Services, once you become an iPhone owner this may not change. I was a long-term Android user before I changed to the Apple ecosystem.

Even though Apple is offering their equivalent of what Google offers on Android, I never found a better alternative for storing pictures than Google Photos.

Google Photos for most of the typical users is unreplaceable due to the Storage Saver option. Thanks to that we can store all our photos and do not pay too much for the storage. At some point we will need to pay Google to store them, however as they are compressed, they consume less space than storing them in full resolution in, for example, Apple Photo Library.

The first thing that I do when setting up my iPhone is to download the Google Photos app from the App Store. This is what I recommend to my friends who switch from Android to iPhone, however, there is one thing that needs to be remembered.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve told my friends and their friends not to send pictures over WhatsApp. If you must do it, please at least change this one thing first to make everyone’s life easier.

Sooner rather than later the time has come when another person asks me what to do when they are running out of space on Google Photos and therefore on Gmail.

It happened! Google calculated that the business it got into with Google Photos, while it has irreversibly changed the way we store photos, is very expensive for itself.

Disk space (storage) and its maintenance cost a lot, and not a little. The energy necessary to ensure the continuity of its services plays an even greater role, especially in the era of caring for the climate.

Someone at Google did not consider the fact that people like what is free, especially when you can’t see the difference. And we are talking about photos and videos stored by us on Google Photos in compressed form, but without losing visual quality, and at the same time without them taking up disk space available as part of the service.

And so after over 4 trillion (4,000,000,000,000) photos uploaded by users to Google Photos, and as large companies began to look at the money they were generating from their operations during the pandemic, it was time for Google to start thinking like a profit-oriented company.

On one hand, someone had a great plan, to offer something that would revolutionize the market. On the other hand, someone had an even better plan!

Did anyone know that after a few years (over 5) of using Google Photos, it would be increasingly difficult for anyone to move from it to another solution, if such a thing exists?

Some time ago on my blog I touched on the topic of storing and managing a collection of photos. With the development of Picasa coming to an end, I decided to use Lightroom.

My adventure with Lightroom lasted for some time, but I always felt insecure when it came to storing photos.